Orem, Utah: With the anticipated announcement of the unbundling of WriteNow, WordPerfect is likely to see a boost in sales beyond the 3200 copies the company said it has shipped to date. In the interim, the company is "in a wait and see mode" regarding NeXT development, said Tracy Powell, director of the NeXT software group.

The company recently scaled back its NeXT development staff from eight programmers to four, according to Tom Mallory, vice president of development. "It's dollars and cents. As the platform can support more programmers, we'll go ahead and put more programmers on it," he said.

Although a new major release of WordPerfect for the NeXT won't happen in the near future, the company plans several "interim releases," said Powell. First on the agenda is support for French and German. Another release will enable exporting of Microsoft Rich Text Format (RTF) files.

The next major release of WordPerfect for the NeXT will include many features now available only in WordPerfect 5.1. "We are going to have equation editing," said Powell, as well as the capability to undelete and create user-programmable macros. The next release may also include the capability to insert voice comments with NeXT's Lip Service.

Powell also raised the prospect of developing a new version of DrawPerfect for the NeXT platform. "We feel that we can make it the best draw package on any platform, but let's make some money before we start spending more," he said.